A student confessed that they produced an essay draft with AI, but that they had intended to revise it later so that it would "sound like" them, and therefore they intended to do right. I feel as though I have failed this person so so utterly. What a work "sounds like" has no bearing on its value. We have so thoroughly commodified writing education that even though I have spent two months teaching this person, they still can't comprehend any purpose to writing beyond not only the end product, but specifically how I will experience that end product for grading purposes. Such alienation. "Inalienable" literally means something which cannot be separated from the self. We often use it to describe rights, but even there I think we misunderstand it. Your hand is inalienable. Obviously you can cut off your hand. But to do so would be such injury that you would be fundamentally different. Your eye is inalienable. Your foot is. These are self-definitional things. We have laws, for example, against organ markets, because we know if we make a free market for kidneys, we will commodify them, and when we do that, people will sell their kidneys. AI writing impinges on this. How? Obviously pieces of writing have long been commodities, we have long bought and sold them both with money, but also with praise and attention. But an invisible dimension of this is that the only way to make a written work is by writing it. The process has always been inalienable from the product. For this reason, we rarely grapple with what writing MEANS to us as writers. As a culture I would say this dimension of writing is almost entirely invisible. But as a writer, and as a teacher of writing, the internal value of writing TO THE WRITER is the PRIMARY purpose of writing. Consider the humble To Do List. (I've posted about this before). You write a To Do List in order to make a plan. Once you have written it, you may never look at it again. But it has done the important work. The first task of writing is to CHANGE THE WRITER. We can see this because AI does this. Over the last year, in order to combat hallucinations, AI companies have realized that if they tell the AI to explain it's own process to itself, it will do the task better. This is called Chain of Thought Reasoning, and the engineers seemed very impressed with themselves. God give me strength. In pedagogy we call this "metacognition" and it is the cornerstone of education. For any skill, if you can explain to yourself how you know what you know, you will master it more quickly. This is why TEACHING is required for scholars. But all metacognition happens through writing. It IS writing. Writing is the tool by which we master our brains. Your foot is important. Your hand, and your eye are each important. But your brain, your self, your being... you can't even say this is "important" because that suggests a priority list. Your "self" is tautological. Nothing is more inalieanble. Your being is you. Metacognition is how you shape, control, and BECOME yourself. "Writing" is the essential tool of metacognition. (We'll extend "writing" to "the disciplined use of language for self-reflection and self-management". So, while physical text is powerful, oral expression also works.) But. We have turned "writing" into this alienated commodity. Plagiarism exists because students have long understood that "writing" was a token they had to exchange for ultimate money, power and status rewards. And we teachers have long used that rhetoric to persuade students to care about writing. This rhetorical posture is so old and entrenched that even most teachers of writing view it as the fundamental telos of writing. "In the real world you need to write clearly and with confidence." "In the real world you need to write with sophistication." "In the real world..." On your resume. In your corporate communications with superiors and co-workers. When writing to clients, patients, professors, congresspeople, civic officials. Et cetera. Et cetera. Writing has long been imagined as a tool of power. Naturally, something that automates that for you is seductive. But there has never been a machine more dangerous than ChatGPT. All machines automate a skill, and once it has been automated the skill degrades in the population. So many people used to be able to SING for the love GOD! So many people could make a chair. So many people could hem a skirt or knit. I don't think I need to completely denigrate the material abundance of the industrial age to point out that we have plainly lost huge dimensions of our humanity when we have automated away craft skills. Do we all need to go back to flint knapping and hide scraping in order to be human? Probably not. (Jesus. I'll note here that when I wrote "knapping" this writing program underlined it in red, indicating that the machine thinks I have spelled the word wrong. And mother fucking fuck I have abso-fucking-lutely not. When the machine intrudes like this, it is coddling you to fucking death.) Anyway. Deep breath. While we have given up many many many skills over the arc of industrial development, we have lost touch with the fact that this is a TRANSACTION. While it has rarely felt this way, in EVERY CASE, we are giving up an aspect of ourselves. We are cutting off hunks of flesh. I am sitting on a comfortable couch. I am enjoying central heating in my home. I am typing this on a computer connected to a network of computers, using an automated micro-blogging protocol with liking and sharing functionality. But I am AWARE of the TRANSACTION. This all COSTS me stuff. Recording the best singers and selling their performances killed the singing in tens of millions of people. It killed the constantly evolving and expanding repertoire of truly folkish music as well. When the first record entrepreneurs went into the mountains, they found WHOLE FAMILIES who sang. The Carter Family sat at the apex of millions of singers in the Appalachian Mountains. Just plainly, EVERYONE sang before the record arrived. But the record turned music into a commodity, and these folk traditions were like oil wells. Folk, country, the blues, etc... all were tapped and drained. And certainly we still have music. And we have different combinatory music traditions that are the product of the collision of these deep wells of folk tradition. But we measurably have radically fewer MUSICIANS. I would trade The Beatles for that previous world. Where many more people were HAPPY. This is what the commodification of art does. It strips art from the people, and sells back to them a cultivated and caged thing. Art is FOR people. Because art IS people. And all of this has been invisible for so long that we cannot even see it. But with AI writing I want to call out to all of you. You ARE writing. Certainly you are many skills. But at the deepest level, you are a Language Creature. A beast made of words. You are thoughts and dreams and jokes and songs and gossip and whispers and reasoning and arguments and exclamations and questions and statements and summations and cries. They automated our walking, and we grew weak. They automated our growing and we grew fat. They automated our singing and we went silent. They automated our loving and we've gone lonely. Language is thought, and thought is language. When they automated our language, we have NOTHING LEFT. @unroll.skywriter.blue unroll